Eulogy examples for a mother, by situation

Some of you only knew my mother in the last four years, and I want to say this at the start: she was extremely funny. That would not have been the first thing you noticed by then, and it is the truest thing about her.

She was funny in a dry, sideways way that took people a while to catch. She would say something completely outrageous in a mild voice and then wait, with a perfectly straight face, to see who had been listening. My husband did not realise she was joking for about two years. She let him not realise. She thought it was funnier that way.

She worked at the county library for twenty-six years and she was magnificent at it, in a way I only understood later. She knew what people were going through by what they borrowed. She would put things aside for them without saying why. There is a man who came to the house last Thursday, who I have never met, who told me she gave him a book in 1998 that changed the direction of his life and that he had never told her.

I keep thinking about that. All the things she did that we will simply never know about now.

There is a question I did not ask her. I meant to. In her forties she went to Paris on her own for eight days, which was a very strange thing for my mother to do, and she never explained it, and every single time I nearly asked, something got in the way. I left it too long. That is the only real regret I have and I am telling you because I would like somebody here to go and ask their mother the thing they have been meaning to ask.

The last years were hard and I am not going to describe them. What I will say is that the humour was the last thing to go. In March, months after she had stopped knowing quite who I was, a nurse dropped an entire tray of cups on the floor, and my mother looked at her and said, “Well done.”

Perfect delivery. Perfect timing. Straight face.

That was her. That was always her, the whole way through, underneath everything.

Thank you for coming today. Ask your mothers the question.

My mother left instructions for everything, and she left them in biro, on the backs of envelopes, in a handwriting that got worse every year.

How to bleed a radiator. What to do if the immersion heater makes the noise. Which neighbour has the spare key and which neighbour must absolutely never be given the spare key.

When my father died she wrote out how to make his mother’s biryani, in full, and gave it to all three of us, unasked, on the same afternoon. Two pages. Step eleven just says “be patient.”

I understand now that this was how she said the thing she could not say directly. She was not a woman who told you she loved you. She told you exactly what to do when she was not there.

We found forty or fifty of these envelopes this week. One of them is about the correct way to speak to the council. It is quite rude.

So we have got the instructions. We are going to be all right, because she made absolutely sure of it, in biro, years in advance.

Thank you, Ma. Step eleven. We are being patient.

My mother and I were not close, and most people here know that, so I am not going to stand up and describe a closeness we did not have.

What I can tell you is what she would have said about today.

She would have said the flowers were too much. She would have counted the cars. She would have had a firm and immediate opinion about at least two outfits in this room, and she would have shared it, quietly, out of the side of her mouth, to whoever was unlucky enough to be standing next to her.

She would have wanted to know what the sandwiches were, in advance, in detail.

I can do this because I did know her. That is the thing about a mother you are not close to — you still know her completely. I can predict her better than I can predict almost anyone alive.

She was not an easy woman and I was not an easy daughter, and we did not manage to fix it in the time we had. I have made my peace with that this week, more than I expected to.

But she taught me to be exact. She could not bear vagueness, in speech or in work, and I have built an entire career on a precision that came directly from her and from nowhere else. I have never once told her that.

So: Mum, you were right about vagueness. You were right about the flowers, they are too much. And I got something from you that has served me every day of my adult life.

Thank you for that. I mean it.